kay – Page 7 – Shadow in the USA

The Cunning Unconscious

Posted on July 19, 2015 by kay

There’s actually nothing more cunning than the human unconscious. That’s right, the unconscious. The things hidden in there are part of our psychological make-up, part of who we intrinsically are, but they want to, and generally can, remain completely hidden from our conscious minds.

Unfortunately, that does not mean we’re free of them. It just means that we can’t see them in ourselves, that we can only see them in other people.

Here’s the General Rule, Part I: if there are some things you just can’t stand to admit about yourself, if you just can’t face some of your own stuff, then you’re going to see your own stuff on someone else’s face.

Guaranteed. Intrinsic parts of your being are not just going to disappear because you’re too embarrassed to acknowledge them. In fact, the reverse actually happens. The longer you fail to acknowledge certain qualities in yourself, the more you’ll see those qualities in other people. And those other people will look more and more awful to you as time goes by.

Let’s say I’m acting like a monster: all pissed off for no discernible reason. Maybe I’m stomping around blaming what’s happening to me on someone else, even if it’s obvious that I caused the problem. Or maybe I’m muttering under my breath about how out of it someone else is, without being able to hear how out of it I sound.

Muttering monsters aren’t just stupid and vindictive. They can only hear in certain frequencies, and can hardly see at all out of those little glaring eyes set way back in their heads.

So when I’m in muttering monster mode I can’t really see or hear what I’m doing. I can’t stop to wonder where all this ill will is coming from, or what such a habit says about me, or make any effort to snap out of it, and I certainly don’t look for a solution to whatever problem I’m muttering about.

Hell, no. I just ‘blame on’ until I run out of steam. Like it’s OK. Like it doesn’t matter. Like it’s not important. And hey, it’s totally normal anyway. Everybody does it! If someone I wanted to impress came over I could cover up my muttering monster with a big ole smile.

Or, I could be one of those people who don’t actually do much of their own original muttering. Maybe I let talk show hosts do most of my muttering for me. Maybe I’m one of those people who tune in to certain stations just so they can gloat and cheer while someone else says really monstrous things. If that eternal belly aching, fault finding, fact twisting, finger pointing, shockingly unfair running down of those who deign to disagree with me is only coming from talk show hosts, then I’m not really a monster, am I? Just because I listen to those stations?

Yep. Afraid so. Muttering monsters aren’t that easy to disown. They’re just as pathetically desperate for attention as everything else in my shadow. In fact, muttering monsters are so pathetically desperate for attention that the better I get at pretending I don’t have any monstrous thoughts myself, the more monstrous everyone else will look.

Kind of explains why we hear so much ranting and raving over the airways, doesn’t it? Why it’s so easy for us to get all hot and bothered about what someone else is doing… why we’re so attracted to vicious speculation and hateful gossip… why we just can’t seem to get off of certain subjects…

General Rule, Part II: we dwell on what others are doing to keep from having to look at what we’re up to ourselves.

“Hate has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them, and in fact the delegation of a piece of one’s own identity to them… the hater longs for the object of his hatred.”–Vaclav Havel

The essence of repression

Posted on April 23, 2015 by kay

“Some unconscious ideas in a human being are incapable of becoming conscious to him in the ordinary way, because they are strenuously disowned and resisted by the conscious self. From this point of view Freud can say that ‘the whole of psychoanalytic theory is in fact built up on the perception of the resistance exerted by the patient when we try to make him conscious of his unconscious.’ The dynamic relation between the unconscious and the conscious life is one of conflict, and psychoanalysis is from top to bottom a science of mental conflict.

The realm of the unconscious is established in the individual when he refuses to admit into his conscious life a purpose or desire which he has, and in doing so establishes in himself a psychic force opposed to his own idea. This rejection by the individual of a purpose or an idea, which nevertheless remains his, is repression. ‘The essence of repression lies simply in the function of rejecting or keeping something out of consciousness.’ Stated in more general terms, the essence of repression lies in the refusal of the human being to recognize the realities of his human nature.” –Norman O. Brown, in Life Against Death, The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, Wesleyan University Press, 1985, p.4.

It’s the beast up there on the stairs, the one in the background, the one we don’t want to invite to dinner, that causes most of our problems.

What we learned from Robin Williams

Posted on April 8, 2015 by kay

It’s 9:38 at night. My grandson will get here at 7:30 tomorrow morning, and I’m 63 years old now, which means I should be going to sleep, not sitting here typing on this goddam keyboard.

But I just watched The Fisher King, with Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges. An old movie, made when there were still push button phones and cassette tapes, produced and directed by Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python fame. A wonderful movie. And knowing what we know now about what happened to Robin Williams later, I’m not going to be able to go to sleep until I write about it. Because Robin Williams’ story is psych-textbook human shadow.

What is the exact opposite, what has to be pushed way down and hidden most of the time, for someone to be as absolutely, eye-poppingly, out of control, over the top funny, as Robin Williams so often was?

Great sadness.

What is the exact opposite of the kind of personal bravery that never hesitates to make a fool of itself in public?

Great fear of actually being a fool.

Where does the brilliantly white light of spot-on performance come from? The light that Robin Williams could turn on in roles as different from one another as the earnest scholar in Dead Poets Society and the genie in Aladdin?

Great black depths of despair.

Robin Williams’ suicide is not just incredibly sad. It’s a warning. Another giant red flag. Heath Ledger. Philip Seymour Hoffman. World events and local politics.

“Go-oooo-d Mor-nnning, Vi-et-nam!” Go-oooo-d mor-nnning all of us.

Being rich is not going to save us. Becoming famous is not going to save us. Even being as stupendously talented as Robin Williams was — which most of us obviously aren’t — is not going to save us.

The only thing that could possibly save the human race from destroying itself — and I have to say I’m not actually sure this is at all possible — would be starting to give honest, critical, out-in-the-open attention to what the hidden parts of us want and need. As much attention as we do to the exposed parts.

The beasts we can’t look right in the eye are the beasts that will kill us.

“The task of confronting the brutal, destructive elements of the shadow has become the inescapable destiny of our species: if we fail, we cannot hope to survive.” –Anthony Stevens, analytical psychologist

Custom remains constant

Posted on March 25, 2015 by kay

“Myth changes while custom remains constant; men continue to do what their fathers did before them, though the reasons on which their fathers acted have long been forgotten.

The history of religion is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason; to find a sound theory for an absurd practice.” –James Frazer, The Golden Bough

Looking for the darkness within, here in Portlandia

Posted on March 14, 2015 by kay

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable, and therefore not popular.” –Carl Jung

I live in Portland, Oregon. If you’ve watched any Portlandia, then you’ll already be aware that we have a fair number of people who lean to the left up here in my neck of the woods. (I love that show. Its creators manage to point out, in an amusing way, how much the far left is just like the far right. It’s always good to poke fun at oneself.)

As Jung was saying up there in the quote, we can’t get any wiser by throwing platitudes around, or by recycling every single plastic bag, or by being as “good” as we possibly can. That’s just not how human consciousness works.

We only get smarter in proportion to how much we can stand to examine the darkness in our own hearts. We’ll only get to where we can ‘see the light,’ by being willing to look into the darkness. Our own darkness. Not other people’s, or the other party’s, or those creeps who don’t recycle. But our own darkness.

“As long as we maintain that all the evil is out there, our ship, like Ahab’s, in on the course of destruction. When we acknowledge that the capacity for evil lives within us as well, we can make peace with our shadow, and our ship can sail safely.”–Andrew Bard Schmookler, analytical psychologist

Pin the tail on the complex

Posted on February 15, 2015 by kay

We can be totally sincere and still do real damage to others — that’s what fanaticism is. Sincerity and integrity are not necessarily equals.

Tunnel vision is actually a complex. When we act out of a complex we think we already know what’s going on, so we react to whatever happens in the same old way. In fact, we can’t see anything else happening but what we already ‘think’ is happening, because we simply can’t pay attention to things which don’t fit into our complex. Tunnel vision produces distortions. It demands selective inattention.

And it tends to get hysterical when opposites or oppositions appear.

We don’t have to go around nurturing that terrible separateness and woundedness, overreacting to everything: opposite opinions, our past, our parents, or even our present.

We could choose to operate from an easier, more productive place where they allow at least two sides to every issue. We could make a game out of it. Pin the tail on the complex, maybe.

Certainty is Absurd

Posted on January 4, 2015 by kay

Will having Republicans in control of most branches of government (as they are now) prevent argument and deadlock? Not likely.

“In this world things can be settled with an either-or attitude only very rarely.” –Goethe

“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.” –Voltaire

The Shadow of Christmas

Posted on December 8, 2014 by kay

One of the best short explanations of how the human shadow works comes from Robert Bly, in A Little Book on the Human Shadow:

The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

Short and sweet.

I love it because the outer-world metaphor — that is exactly how light effects shadow in the physical world — synchs up so perfectly with the inner-world experience. The greatest evils are often performed by people who are perfectly sure of their righteousness. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

A nice, sweet, calm, intelligent person is just as busy as any of the rest of us building up a mean, rude, stupid, violent inner-personality (usually well hidden in that person’s shadow) who manages to get loose and pop out at weird times, in weird ways, and is capable of inflicting real damage to others. “I don’t know what came over me!” And no time of year stokes and provokes the stupid-shadow-self in each one of us more than Christmas time.

That’s because, on the surface, everything is sugar-coated in December. We glorify peace and love and kindness – there’s nothing the shadow hates worse – in songs and cards and decorations and syrupy TV shows, while using cut-throat competition, below-living wages, environmental degradation, and political power plays to get things done.

To bring it right down to the minute, try listening to what runs through your head for an hour or two during the Christmas season. Is it peaceful? Is it full of good will toward men? Not so much. Hhmph. Who knows if ‘peace on earth’ or ‘good will toward men’ is even possible? Looking at history or current events, you’d have to say those are strange concepts for our particular species to be singing about.

And most of our family situations are so at odds with the sweetness of commercial Christmas, too. It’s destabilizing. We forget that neither Norman Rockwell’s or Currier & Ives’ paintings were pictures of real life.

So before we go any further let’s stop and remind ourselves that Christmas is not going to come off flawlessly this year. That we will not get everything we wanted. That we’re liable to stress ourselves out buying things we know we can’t afford, or trying to find time to make cookies we shouldn’t actually eat. That none of our relatives will be as likable as Jimmy Stewart or Donna Reed.

Hell! Even Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed weren’t that nice. They were playing characters in a movie. Entitled: “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Sheesh.

Thanks to our partners reviews site

There’s No Such Thing As A Reliable Narrator

Posted on November 18, 2014 by kay

Nobody qualifies as a reliable narrator. Not when they’re telling their own story. We all have vast egos to protect, and even vaster shadows to protect them with. All any of us can do is try to be a reliable narrator.

When I’m asked by someone new about my own personal history (careers, moves, marriages, divorces), I find I have to really slow down and search my heart to keep from dropping into the “good guy, bad guy” mode as soon as I open my mouth. And probably still do so even when I’m trying not to.

We all want to be the hero of our own story, no doubt about it.

But even more than that, we want for someone else to be the villain.

On beliefs and beheadings

Posted on September 18, 2014 by kay

This is from the introduction to The Case for God, by Karen Armstrong, published in 2009:

“During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time that historians call the early modern period, Western people began to develop an entirely new kind of civilization, governed by scientific rationality and based economically on technology and capital investment. Logos achieved such spectacular results that myth was discredited and the scientific method was thought to be the only reliable means of attaining truth. This would make religion difficult, if not impossible. As theologians began to adopt the criteria of science, the mythos of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally, and historically verifiable and forced into a style of thinking that was alien to them. Philosophers and scientists could no longer see the point of ritual, and religious knowledge became theoretical rather than practical. We lost the art of interpreting the old tales of gods walking the earth, dead men striding out of tombs, or seas parting miraculously. We began to understand concepts such as faith, revelation, myth, mystery, and dogma in a way that would have been very surprising to our ancestors. In particular, the meaning of the word “belief” changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith, so much so that today we often speak of religious people as “believers,” as though accepting orthodox dogma on “faith” were their most important activity.

This rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related. The defensive piety popularly known as fundamentalism erupted in almost every major faith during the twentieth century. In their desire to produce a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished mythos in favor of logos, Christian fundamentalists have interpreted scripture with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion. In the United States, Protestant fundamentalists have evolved an ideology known as “creation science” that regards the mythoi of the Bible as scientifically accurate. They have, therefore, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in the public schools, because it contradicts the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis.” –Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p. XV in hard back edition

And of course, we now have Islamic “believers” on the other side of the world bombing and beheading those who disagree with their beliefs. Ouch.

During the recent “Cosmos” series on TV, the narrator pointed out that we are only 400 years away from the first time anyone looked at the stars through a telescope. 400 years. That is no time, evolutionarily speaking, since everyone thought that the world was flat and that a God who lived up in the sky would send them to either heaven or hell when they died (or reincarnate them after death). It’s certainly (and obviously) not enough time for most people on the planet to adapt their thinkings and imaginings to a universe far more vast, intricate and impersonal than their elders could have ever imagined.

Thus we all find ourselves caught in the pincers of a dying scorpion: last-gasp, backward-yearning, earth-centric thinking. And the clearer it becomes that its beliefs are not based on reality, the more violently will this dying scorpion thrash around. Ouch.